Losing My Mind At This Pic Of Pop Thorn

Havelock Vetinari is literature's most dangerous tyrant.

Astute, learned, and wickedly clever, there are no ends the man will not go to in achieving his goals. There is no one he will not manipulate, no one too important to remove by a variety of means, and no one so powerful as to threaten his position.

And this applies, most importantly of all, to himself. Who watches the Watch, after all?

But Vetinari is literature's most dangerous tyrant because he is at once, yes, a tyrant, but ALSO literature's most dedicated civil servant.

He cares for the city. And ONLY for the city. It is from this position of being the man who truly only cares for Ahnk Morpork that he derives his authority. After all, who cares as much as he does?

Vimes? Perhaps, but he's a married man and a father with private concerns that should take his attention as well (even if Vetinari has to constantly remind him of that fact). He has other things to worry about, but good job that man for sticking to his lane: a sledgehammer sized scalpel for repelling threats and keeping the peace.

Carrot? Certainly, but Carrot cares more for the PEOPLE than the CITY. His mind is on the present, keeping the ones who are alive upright and breathing and getting justice for those tragically cut short. He is not concerned with the welfare of the CITY, as such. Not with the future the next generation shall inherit.

The guilds? Self-interested fools who were happy to take what Havelock gave them: stability and a piece of the pie no sane person would eat. They are content to squabble over portions of nebulous power, and all of them recognize that if Vetinari were gone... well, it doesn't much bear thinking about, really.

The nobles? Self-interested fools who are UNhappy with what Vetinari has given them: a slow walk to total obscurity and an eternal life in the back catalogues of Twerp's Peerage. Besides, they tend to only be effective when they can convince others to foolishly do their bidding, and the market for such men has seen a suspicious dearth in supply as late.

The wizards? Certainly not. Tried that before, thank you, and everyone seems much happier when gravity remains consistent and no one randomly becomes newts. Let them remain in their university, fat, happy, and most definitely NOT doing any bloody magic.

Lipwig? Maybe. In time. If he is convinced that it is in his own self-interest and things remain... interesting. But he also has Spike and the Bank and the Post Office, and a man can only juggle so much before suddenly there's a chainsaw in the front row and an awful lot of screaming. Best to keep him in practice of course, but... no. Not yet.

Vetinari uses all of them. They are tools in his box as he tunes and fixes and cares for the Disc's greatest city. The Turtle moves, but so does the Patrician, and it is a close contest on who shifts greater mountains. It is easy to imagine more than a few of the gods on Cori Celeste are keeping an eye on him and wondering what he's up to.

Except for the smart ones. They are doubtlessly taking notes.

Might I add: the death ray from The Weakest Link teleported people instead, and was yellow.

I think it's time to go back to the end of the last episode. The last scene, you know thr whole "the pieces of earth were in front of them but they didn't see them".

It's because those bits and pieces don't exist yet when they go look outside. Both in a "the earthvhasnt been destroyed yet" but also in a "what hasn't appeared onscreen doesn't exist yet".

And I love the this episode add to this with the whole "but once the camera is gone it keeps existing".

So you know the rumour about a Margot Robbie PotC film...p

she's everything

He also gave his kids a goblin themed (the North Polar Bear comes up with it based on goblin cave art) writing system to decipher, it's legitimately good.

If you can get a copy of the book, I seriously recommend you do. It's such a good read.

I know everyone talks about how Tolkien infused his war ptsd into LOTR but did you know he wrote letters to his kids from 'santa' and they include a full on war with goblins to save Christmas?? And polar bears and elves (the shelf kind) getting injured and starving like this man could never be chill he had to have a battle and I love that for him

Let's get you in the box, fish. It might be a squeeze but I'm sure you can manage.

put me in the 1 inch x 1 inch x 1 inch box coach!!! I'm all fired up, I'm ready!!!!!

Hermaeus Mora has found his way in.

He is secret, and needs not tags.

Offer him comments, spread him with reblogs and praise him with likes.

I felt like drawing tentacles, and he just appeared on the paper.

I'm very much enjoying the recent pages and just how much character is pouring out especially through body language and facial expressions. My favorite being how Tess is just so nonchalant like this is a normal Tuesday and Tynan's mix of confused and pissed. So I wonder how do you draw facial expressions? I do pencil and paper art as a hobby and for me they're one of the harder things to get down right.

Ahh, facial expressions, the backbone of a character-driven story. I can't remember ever sitting down and perfecting How To Draw Faces, but while I struggled with it a lot early on, I don't remember having much trouble with it in recent years, so evidence suggests that the faces I draw were in large part refined naturally during my chibi-drawing video-making process, which makes me think that the skillset can be refined even if the faces in question are incredibly stylized. Eyes, eyebrows and mouths are apparently all you need for the basics.

Cartoon facial expressions have a benefit of modularity - you can get away with swapping out or tweaking individual parts of the expression without having to do any redrawing of the underlying head shape (a difficulty faced by more realistic or more squash-and-stretch-heavy styles, as faces can be VERY flexible and a mouth shape or eyebrow arrangement can reshape the entire profile of the head). This can help us see how extremely complex our ability to read facial emotions really is. Tiny changes can communicate entirely different vibes.

It doesn't take much repositioning or tweaking to get across a potentially very complex emotion.

Every time I try to think of a hard list of do's and don'ts for this, I fail. Facial expressions can be arbitrarily complicated. Rules like "make sure each part of the expression is communicating the same emotion" might sound good on paper, but in practice you can get a lot of mileage out of an expression where every part is saying something different - a big smile with sad eyes, a small smirk with a calm open gaze, etc. We parse facial expressions as a whole, not as a sum of parts. Like a lot of art, getting an expression to say what you want it to is mostly a matter of tweaking it until it looks right. Suppose we want to make our example elf dude look devastated.

Pretty good, but maybe a little too subdued. This gives me "you just told me something horrible that I haven't fully processed yet" vibes. Let's tweak the mouth to pull the corners out more, putting more tension in their face.

That makes them seem a little less frozen. It looks like they're breathing in, getting ready to say or yell something. But maybe instead of SAD devastated, we want FURIOUS devastated. So let's tweak the eyebrows, where anger is stored.

The other expressions give a feeling of open devastation, perhaps witnessing some incomprehensible tragedy - this new expression looks more focused. Maybe they're currently staring down the person who got them so upset, waiting for them to stop monologuing. Maybe once they're done processing, they'll look a little more like this.

That's a powerful face, but we've strayed pretty far from "devastated" by the end there. Maybe they've started their "you can never win" speech against whoever got them so upset. There's determination in that expression - whatever they were feeling before, they've sharpened it down to a knife's edge.

I wish I could give better advice than "just draw about a million little chibi faces and eventually you'll work it out through sheer numbers" but I really can't think of a better way to get good at pulling together specific emotions to match what's happening in the character's head.

sidenote this ask reminded me how much otherwise solid superhero comic art absolutely blows at facial expressions and how much that annoys me, it cannot be that hard to draw nightwing pretty

If I could turn back time, I'd be more responsible. Then I'd make a family of Gollum.

Sorry to anyone this happened to (I would be fuming) but I am howling at EA incompetently creating cursed jewellery by mistake.